US suppressing Huawei is unfair persecution

The world is witnessing an unprecedented injustice in the technological field: The US has been mobilizing its allies in an attempt to strangle the Chinese high-tech company Huawei.

Washington is not only blocking Huawei products including telecommunication equipment and mobile phones from its own market, but also demanding allies shut Huawei out of the construction of their 5G network. The reason is Huawei's equipment may threaten these countries' network security, especially the security of military communication between the nations and Washington.

Why does Huawei equipment pose such a threat? The most frequently cited reason is the company has a close relationship with the Chinese government and may coordinate with them in collecting intelligence, installing certain devices in its products to steal information. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei's identity as a former army officer is one of the main pieces of evidence for the hypothesis.

The move to exclude Huawei, the accusation that Huawei has been illegally providing equipment to Iran and the arrest of the enterprise's executive occurred successively. This series of operations have apparently been coordinated and form a historically rare persecution in the scientific and technological sector.

Huawei is the most successful private Chinese enterprise in cyber communication technologies, standing at the forefront of 5G technology. The company owns one of the largest research teams and the largest scale of patents among transnational corporations. Its management model has drawn extensive lessons from major Western companies. Many core members are foreigners. When it comes to either operating norms or internationalization, Huawei has reached the highest standard of multinational companies.

The US is framing Huawei and mustering other forces to suppress this Chinese company. The company can be described as decent from whatever perspective. The US move severely violates basic morality that has been supporting global scientific and technological progress for a long time. It is a brutal interference and an attack against the system of scientific and technological innovation, which in peacetime is dominated by the intellectual property system and free market rules. It is a major retrogression to allow geopolitics to dominate everything.

Huawei's case sets up an extremely unfair stumbling block to China's rightful development. It demonstrates to the world the strategic selfishness of the US and some other Western forces who want to maintain their capability to monopolize scientific and technological progress.

Those who are following the US footsteps in boycotting Huawei should be reminded that cracking down on a company is cracking down on international competition. They have given Washington the power to redefine the international scientific research order, market order and political order. This is definitely not a good thing for smaller countries.

The order those countries need should not be forcefully promoted or arbitrarily modified by a single superpower, but should contain implicit support for checks and balances. Crippling Huawei is crippling every country's ability to implement independence and sovereignty based on the existence of multiple options. Therefore the move to encircle and suppress Huawei will never turn into a glorious chapter of history in the US or the West.